Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Solitude

“The cure for loneliness is solitude”— Marianne Moore

SOURCE

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is a society, where none intrudes,

By the deep sea, and music in its roar;

I love not man the less, but Nature more”— Lord Byron

     Midweek Motif ~ Solitude

We all have an inner space within us to house our own thoughts, feelings. It’s wonderful to be lost there; to be alone; to find the ‘self’ and the ‘bliss of solitude’.

Solitude is an essential human need to replenish the soul. It does clear the weary mind of the clutter and gives élan to your existence.

No wonder poets and artists often choose to be solitary.

Our Motif today is Solitude:

Winter Solitude

by Matsuo Basho

Winter solitude--
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

(Translated by Robert Hass) 

The Solitude of Night

by Li Po

It was at a wine party—

I lay in a drowse, knowing it not.

The blown flowers fell and filled my lap.

When I arose, still drunken,

The birds had all gone to their nests,

And there remained but few of my comrades.

I went along the river—alone in the moonlight.

   (Translated by Shigeyoshi Obata)

Solitude

by Harold Monro

WHEN you have tidied all things for the night,
And while your thoughts are fading to their sleep,
You'll pause a moment in the late firelight,
Too sorrowful to weep.

The large and gentle furniture has stood
In sympathetic silence all the day
With that old kindness of domestic wood;
Nevertheless the haunted room will say:
'Someone must be away.'

The little dog rolls over half awake,
Stretches his paws, yawns, looking up at you,
Wags his tail very slightly for your sake,
That you may feel he is unhappy too.

A distant engine whistles, or the floor
Creaks, or the wandering night-wind bangs a door

Silence is scattered like a broken glass.
The minutes prick their ears and run about,
Then one by one subside again and pass
Sedately in, monotonously out.

You bend your head and wipe away a tear.
Solitude walks one heavy step more near. 

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Writing Poetry)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Silence

       “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

SOURCE

“The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.” — Charlotte Brontë

       Midweek Motif ~ Silence

We all know how still, quiet or at rest Silence is. What an absolutely soundless world we enter into if we could really step into Silence!

How to bring Silence into this cacophonous, noisy world?

Where to find that soundlessness? Is Silence merely absence of sound or more than that?

Or is it this Silence that we fear most so we fill up every inch of it with sound? Is Silence oppressive?

Let’s explore the world of Silence today:

Silence

by Thomas Hood

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. 

           

After Long Silence

by William Butler Yeats

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant. 

Silence

by Marianne Moore

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences. 

Aprons Of silence

By Carl Sandburg

Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it--on the streets, in the post office,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board."
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence. 

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

 (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Meteor Showers)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Gravity

“Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.”
― Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself.

I am governed by the pull of the sentence as

the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity."
―Marianne Moore

But the strong base and building of my love
Is as the very centre of the earth,
Drawing all things to 't.
— William Shakespeare

Midweek Motif ~ Gravity

"Gravity is the force that attracts two bodies toward each other, the force that causes apples to fall toward the ground and the planets to orbit the sun. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull."

source
(Today is Apple Day in Great Britain.)

Gravity is also seriousness, solemnity and dignity.

Your Challenge:  

Write a new poem 

with lots of gravity in it.

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Height Is the Distance Down

BY MARY BARNARD

What’s geography? What difference what mountain   

it is? In the intimacy of this altitude   

its discolored snowfields overhang half the world.

On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky,   

feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind   

spinning the blood-weighted body head downward.

The mountain that had become a known profile   

on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth   

     . . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.)

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Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community.

(Next week Susan's Midweek Motif will be ~ Animation)